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Thursday, April 5. 2012

From the lead article in the Wichita Eagle today, titled "Five Days
with No Courts":

Closing state courts for five days will save about $1.2 million in
the court budget, but could cost the state's troubled unemployment
budget as much as $750,000.

On Wednesday, Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss announced
that courts will be closed and employees, except judges, will be
furloughed for five days between now and June 8, to deal with a $1.4
million shortfall that legislators didn't handle before they ended
their regular session Friday.

If all five furlough days take place, the state will lose roughly
60,000 hours of work time.

However, the furloughs are structured in such a way that most court
employees will likely be eligible to claim a form of unemployment
benefit that will pay roughly 50 to 60 percent of their salaries for
the days they're off, court officials said.That money will come from the state unemployment fund, which had to
borrow from the federal government during the recession and is still
paying back more than $163 million of debt.

It's impossible to overstate what an embarrassment the Kansas state
legislature has been since the 2010 elections. While neglecting to keep
the state government in decent running order, they've passed laws to
restrict voting rights and to make abortions even more costly and more
inaccessible. They've killed off state funding for the arts, thereby
sacrificing federal funding, but the state has wound up spending close
to $500,000 in court trying to defend the constitutionality of their
new anti-abortion laws. They still haven't managed to pass a law with
new congressional districts: one idiot plan that some keep pushing is
to attach heavily-Democrat Wyandotte county (Kansas City, KS) to the
sparsely populated far West district that gave a rookie Republican
extremist a 72% vote in 2010.

The post-2010 legislature isn't much different than the ones that
preceded it -- both were overwhelmingly Republican. The difference
is that after 16 years of moderate Republican and/or Democratic
governors (Graves, Sibelius, Parkinson), which limited the damage
the increasingly right-wing legislators could do, the new guy in
the mansion is Sam Brownback. You may recall that Brownback ran for
president in 2008 -- miserably, I might add. Now, his ambitions are
undiminished, and he's trying to rack up a record as a man of action
with his social engineering programs.

But the legislature hasn't bowed down to Brownback. They've actively
connived to make his proposals even worse then he intended. For example,
Brownback's income tax plan proposed to exempt the Kochs and Ruffins
from paying state income taxes, while ending the Earned Income Credit
for the poor and gutting deductions for the middle class. The lege --
I might as well start using Molly Ivins's Texas nomenclature since it's
equally applicable here -- kept the worst ideas but turned it into a
budget-busting monstrosity. It's still up in the air, but the relatively
small matter of shutting down the court system is but a taste of what
the lege is promising.

It's hard not to think that the end if the Republicans go unchecked
in Kansas is a wasteland. Sometimes they do it on purpose. Sometimes
they just screw up.